Meanings Of Things Quotes

#1. There's truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game. That's what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words.

Tom Waits

#2. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.

Alan W. Watts

#3. I have made a similar suggestion for poetry: that one should approach it as pure sonority, reading and rereading it as a sort of music, and should not introduce meanings or intentions into the diction before clearly grasping the system of sounds that every poem must offer on pain of nonexistence.

Paul Valery

#4. All the familiar things were getting different meanings.

Jeanette Winterson

#5. As an artist you're looking for universal triggers. You want it both ways. You want it to have an immediate impact, and you want it to have deep meanings as well. I'm striving for both. But I hate it when people write things that sound like they've swallowed a f ... dictionary.

Damien Hirst

#6. Just look up any symbol, and you'll find that the meanings behind that symbol are revealed in a manner you can actually apply to the situations that are affecting your life- and the choices that are available to you right now!

Leon Nacson

#7. We want to do something and a definition is a means of doing it. If we want certain results then we must use certain meanings or definitions. But no definition has any authority apart from a purpose, or to bar us from other purposes.

I. A. Richards

#8. It's really funny, because if you make up words, then people project their own meanings onto it, which I find interesting.

Aphex Twin

#9. But the self is precisely the integrator; it is the synthetic unity, as Kant said. It is the artist of life. It is only a small factor in the total organism/environment interaction, but it plays the crucial role of finding and making the meanings that we grow by.

Paul Goodman

#10. In our time, what is at issue is the very nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as a man. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of human nature.

C. Wright Mills

#11. In the Bible there are three distinctive meanings of grace; It means the mercy and active love of God; It means the winsome attractiveness of God; It means the strength of God to overcome.

Charles L. Allen

#12. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Oscar Wilde

#13. Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.

Eugene Ionesco

#14. I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.

Bill Viola

#15. This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.

Werner Erhard

#16. on the meanings of the behaviors rather than the behaviors themselves. Chapter 2 reviews the historical roots of identity theory, not only in symbolic interaction, but also, just as crucially, in the cybernetics

Anonymous

#17. Where names of people or places would mean little to a contemporary reader, I figured "translation errors" could create interesting new meanings.

Hal Duncan

#18. Silence has a myriad of meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning.

Sanford Meisner

#19. So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with.

John Locke

#20. I would regard meanings
given by others so far
as refreshing boon,
I would still be enamoured of rose
or any heartless flower's smell
if tender tides of your affection
had not suffused
the pollens of my heart
with loving aroma.

Suman Pokhrel

#21. We invest the moment with meanings it may not necessarily have. We constrain and limit the potential outcomes by imposing external expectations, by imagining and anticipating how others will see things, what they might say...when in reality none of that might matter." ~Jeremy William Carling

Stephanie Laurens

#22. Rhyme patterns are nothing without meanings to the words. A lot of rappers can do those flows, but the raps aren't really about anything - which is cool sometimes, but to have the flow and the message is one of my favorite things.

J. Cole

#23. For it was not so much that by means of words I came to a complete understanding of things, as that from things I somehow had an experience which enabled me to follow the meaning of words.

Plutarch

#24. It felt like they were telling each other secrets. Everything they said felt like that - whispered, tender, full of other meanings, like when you tell someone a dream or talk about your astrological signs as code for all the things you love about each other.

Francesca Lia Block

#25. Imagination has the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new.

Thomas Merton

#26. Lord Vetinari in a meeting: what people said was what they wanted him to hear. He paid a lot of attention to the spaces outside the words, though. That's where the things were that they hoped he didn't know and didn't want him to find out.

Terry Pratchett

#27. Physical things are eloquent tokens of ideas,enriched by new meanings through time even when the tokens are no more than evanescent paper representations.

Mary Catherine Bateson

#28. Everywhere in my house are these little things that have meanings and make me think of great memories.

Nate Berkus

#29. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

Oscar Wilde

#30. This was always the problem with my mother and me, I suddenly realized. There were so many things we thought we agreed on, but anythign can have two meanings. Like sides of a coin, it just matters how it falls.

Sarah Dessen

#31. In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.

Paul Auster

#32. Look at the stars," said Tim. "Don't you ever wonder what they're for?"
The Night was an open book of constellations.
"They're for the same as everything else, "said Sam. They're just for themselves."
The stars silently agreed.

Toby Forward

#33. Why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.

Herman Melville

#34. The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#35. Poetry, in the entire course of its development, has always been trying to capture meanings and problems which are still obscure and dormant. Poetry tries to awaken them with a kiss, wherever they may be: in the air, in things, in human beings.

Mieczyslaw Jastrun

#36. There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation.

Bridget Riley

#37. Words have very potent meanings and people read them and they react to them personally. They are very suggestive in terms of your life and things like that.

Robert Barry

#38. Marriages had different meanings back then than they do now, they were used to cement agreements between families, business deals and things like that. The idea of marriages being arranged for love is some sort of modern idea, really.

Jared Harris

#39. Words cannot only be made ... But made to have a meaning, free the tongue and continue your speech.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#40. When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#41. 'Natural' is a word that has become unmoored by its meanings. If you go into a vitamin shop, things are natural, and people look at that, and they think it's good. It's no different than any other thing you swallow.

Michael Specter

#42. For me, spirit is the impulse towards life, the Eros in a person leaping forward, whereas soul refers to something possibly long.. suffering, where meanings are made, where there is a sense of this gathering of perceptions, that our death is not the most important thing, nor our life.

Michael Leunig

#43. All we have to do is understand that we're all here for a reason and to commit ourselves to that. Then we can laugh at our sufferings, large and small and walk fearlessly, aware that each step has meaning

Paulo Coelho

#44. For better or worse, whether it is a sign of aesthetic complexity or of intellectual indecision, this novel [Frankenstein] offers equally fertile ground to those readers who like their meanings ambiguous and indeterminate and to those who prefer to discern a deeply important doctrine.

Richard T. Nash

#45. One writes to find words' meanings.

Joy Williams

#46. (Emerson's) aphorisms tend to be chicken soup for the academic soul or gobledygook of a man who prefers the sounds of words to their meanings.

Micah Mattix

#47. All the definitions people want to put on you in terms of what kind of writer you are come with hidden meanings. If you're writing science fiction, you're writing rocket ships. If you write dystopian fiction, it's inequity where The Man must be fought.

Paolo Bacigalupi

#48. It's better for the listener to interpret their own meanings to the music.

Kelly Jones

#49. An able reader often discovers in other people's writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects.

Michel De Montaigne

#50. To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.

George Saunders

#51. When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.

Stephen Spender

#52. A writer draws a road map where readers walks with their love, joy, anger, tears, and dismay. Every story, every poem, has different meanings for every reader.

Debasish Mridha

#53. Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them.

Blaise Pascal

#54. To say that ... behaviors have different 'meanings' is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.

B.F. Skinner

#55. Perhaps like the many and various meanings of the word "we," liberals use the word "unsubstantiated" to mean "tested repeatedly and proved true."

Ann Coulter

#56. I have never had a problem with people not being able to understand the words and the meanings in Titus.

Julie Taymor

#57. The store of wisdom does not consist
of hard coins which keep their shape
as they pass from hand to hand;
it consists of ideas and doctrines
whose meanings change
with the minds that entertain them.

John Plamenatz

#58. Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words.

Christian Nestell Bovee

#59. I think there are no meaningful images. Meanings are created outside of the image.

Joachim Schmid

#60. At all periods of the [English] language it is difficult to assign a beginning date to most new words and meanings. They tend to slip into the language silently, and are placed in date order only when scholars subsequently get to work.

Robert Burchfield

#61. I'm a product of a military dictatorship. Under a dictatorship, you cannot trust information or dispense it freely because of censorship. So Brazilians become very flexible in the use of metaphors. They learn to communicate with double meanings.

Vik Muniz

#62. It's fun to invent systems and meanings and then poke holes in them.

Marty Rubin

#63. I am interested in what I term gestalts; picture circumstances which bring together disparate images or ideas so as to form new meanings and new configurations.

Robert Heinecken

#64. We find the meanings of life when we dedicate ourselves to alleviate human sufferings.

Debasish Mridha

#65. In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.

Karen Russell

#66. We singers have a different level of responsibility from other musicians. We have words that we must convey; we have meanings that we must convey through these lyrics.

Jessye Norman

#67. Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings ... but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.

Robert A. Heinlein

#68. Myths remind us of the symbolic presence within all the lost-and-found adventures that alone can give life meaning. Losing touch with the world of myth means losing the sense that life is deeply meaningful, full of meanings trying to be revealed at each twist and turn in the ongoing drama.

Michael Meade

#69. The orange flames waved at the crowd as paper and print dissolved inside them. Burning words were torn from their sentences.

Markus Zusak

#70. Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone.

Octavio Paz

#71. Any good album title has multiple meanings, and I like choosing titles where I find myself repeating it, almost like a mantra.

DJ Shadow

#72. Now in my opinion it is certainly a complete mistake to suppose that no narrative of events in this type of literature has any significance beyond the purely historical record; but it is equally rash to maintain that every single statement in those books is a complex of allegorical meanings. That

Augustine Of Hippo

#73. A satyagrahi is sometimes bound to use language which is capable of two meanings, provided both the meanings are obvious and necessary and there is no intention to deceive anyone.

Mahatma Gandhi

#74. Silence is a great companion when words are devoid of meanings.

Nema Al-Araby